At the ongoing UNCCD COP16 summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the Global Environment Facility(GEF) has selected seven projects as winners of its first Innovation Window, which will provide $12.3 million in grants to initiatives that test and pilot new solutions to stubborn challenges, from improving food systems to protecting wild cat habitats.
GEF is a multilateral family of funds dedicated to confronting biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution, and supporting land and ocean health.
Its financing enables developing countries to address complex challenges and work towards international environmental goals.
The partnership includes 186 member governments as well as civil society, Indigenous Peoples, women, and youth, with a focus on integration and inclusivity. Over the past three decades, the GEF has provided more than $25 billion in financing and mobilized $145 billion for country-driven priority projects.
The family of funds includes the Global Environment Facility Trust Fund, Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF), Nagoya Protocol Implementation Fund (NPIF), and Capacity-building Initiative for Transparency Trust Fund (CBIT).
The Innovation Window program was launched as part of the GEF’s eighth funding cycle, to support and help road-test novel approaches, tools, and business models for complex problems related to biodiversity, climate change, pollution, and inter-related areas, engaging new and varied partners.
According to Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, CEO and Chairperson of the GEF, the Innovation Window is a new and unique opportunity for the GEF to support highly innovative ideas together with partners from the private sector, civil society, academia, and leading research institutions.
“We are looking forward to boosting technologies, policies, and business models that can enhance the impact of the GEF’s funding to deliver global environmental benefits at scale and support a systems change towards societies and economies that are nature-positive, low-carbon, and pollution-free.”
The winning projects were chosen from an initial pool of 128 applications and cover a wide range of issues in finance, behavior change, systems transformation, technology, and tools.
Winners include a project that seeks to accelerate collaborative and adaptive approaches to address complex environmental challenges, focusing on the link between food, biodiversity, and climate. Another winning project will develop a comprehensive guidance on finance for nature-positive, with a framework to be used by investors, banks, and insurers.
Five of the projects are global in their reach, one focuses on Latin America and one on Africa. The Africa project will pioneer innovative approaches to food systems transformation.
The Latin America project will help protect jaguar conservation along a vast stretch of land – known as the Jaguar Corridor – through a satellite and automated cloud-based monitoring and assessment system.
Among the winning projects is C3 Labs – Collaboration for Complex Challenges: addressing the food-biodiversity-climate nexus.
This project focuses on strengthening the evidence base to accelerate systemic, collaborative, and adaptive approaches to address complex environmental challenges.
By homing in on the food-biodiversity-climate nexus, it seeks to support greater integration of government and development sector programing across the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets, and connect to national pathways for food systems transformation.
It will also generate practical guidance on how to bridge the gap between the theories of collaboration and systems transformation and their real-world application.
“The C3 Labs project tackles persistent barriers to collaborative solutions for complex development challenges.
By piloting a Fellowship Program and Collaboration Lab in Kenya and Thailand, with a focus on the food-biodiversity-climate nexus, the project tests whether fostering trust, collaboration, and systems thinking can drive institutional change,” Herman Brouwer, Senior Advisor, multi-stakeholder collaboration for food, agriculture and nature, Wageningen University & Research said.
“A Global Learning Lab aims to build evidence and influence global policies to support systemic practices. Aligned with the GEF Innovation Window, C3 Lab aims to demonstrate scalable, transformative approaches to global environmental challenges,” he added.
Amount: $1.9 million
Implementing agency: United Nations Development Programme
Partners: Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation; Food and Agriculture Organization; United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Location: Global
